• @leopold
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    28 days ago

    Package management is probably the biggest thing a Linux user might need to use the terminal for. The graphical package managers used by default on most desktop environments are far too limited.

    KDE’s Discover for instance is capable of installing (graphical) desktop applications, uninstalling packages and performing updates. Sure, it supports native packages on the majority of distros through PackageKit, as well as Flatpaks and Snaps, but it can only perform very basic package manager operations. I imagine most users will at some point need to install a package that isn’t a graphical desktop application, such as a driver or an optional dependency and they will need to use the terminal for it.

    To my knowledge, this is also the state of most other graphical package managers that take the form of “software centers” like Discover. More powerful graphical package managers do exist, usually specific to a specific package manager such as Octopi for Pacman. Few distros ship with them, however. I believe one notable exception is OpenSUSE with YaST. There’s also dnfdragora on Fedora, which is pretty basic, but might be good enough for most purposes.

    • @JustARegularNerd@aussie.zone
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      28 days ago

      There is also Synaptic which is a graphical front-end for apt, although I would definitely class it as less user friendly than Discover and the like.

      I know if I was doing some Linux challenge with no terminal it would have to be my crutch.

      Edit: Arch Linux has pamac which I used more frequently than the terminal back then.